1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a front panel assembly of a disk drive, and a disk drive incorporating the same. More particularly, the present invention relates to a front panel assembly of a disk drive having a door locking apparatus for selectively locking a door through which a tray comes in and out, and a disk drive incorporating the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, a disk drive is an apparatus for recording and/or reproducing information on and from an optical disk such as a compact disk (CD), a digital video disk (DVD), or the like. The disk drive has a tray for accommodating a disk, which is loaded in or unloaded from a body, and a front panel assembly having an entrance through which the tray retracts and extends, which is mounted in front of the body.
FIG. 1 is an exploded perspective view of a conventional front panel assembly of a disk drive, and FIG. 2 is a sectional view taken along line A–A′ in FIG. 1. Referring to FIGS. 1 and 2, there is shown a body 110 of a disk drive, a tray 120, a front panel 130, a door 140, and a torsion spring 150. The tray 120 is assembled with the body 110 and retracts and extends in the directions of arrows B and C of FIG. 1. The front panel 130 is mounted in front of the body 110. The front panel 130 includes an entrance 131 through which the tray 120 comes in and out, support members 132 and 133 to support the door 140, and a fixing member 134, to which an arm 151 of the torsion spring 150 is fixed. The door 140 closes the entrance 131 to cover the inside of the body 110 while the tray 120 is loaded therein. Hinge arms 141 are provided at the left and right ends of the door 140. The hinge arms 141 are assembled with, and rotate in the support members 132 and 133. Further, a limit member 142 is provided at the right hinge arm 141. The torsion spring 150 is set around the right end of the hinge arm 141. One arm 151 of the spring 150 is fixed to the fixing member 134 of the front panel 130. The other arm 152 of the spring 150 provides an elastic force to the limit member 142 to rotate the door 140 in the direction of closing the door 140, i.e., in the direction of an arrow D in FIG. 1. When the door 140 is closed after the tray 120 is loaded in the body 110, the limit member 142 contacts the rear side of the front panel 130 and prevents the door 140 from excessively rotating in the direction of arrow D in FIG. 1.
With the structure as described above, while the tray 120 is in a retracted state, the door 140 is kept closed by the elastic force of the torsion spring 150. However, when the tray 120 slides out in the direction of the arrow B in FIG. 1, for example, to accommodate a disk, the front side 121 of the tray 120 contacts and pushes the door 140, and accordingly, the door 140 rotates in the direction of an arrow E in FIG. 2. Then, the tray 120 slides through the entrance 131. When the tray 120 retracts again in the direction of the arrow C in FIG. 1, the door 140 rotates in the direction of the arrow D in FIG. 1 by the elastic force of the torsion spring 150, and then the door 140 closes again.
These days, disk drives are manufactured to have higher rotational speeds for faster data transfer, as well as a higher capacity for larger data storage. The rotational speed of a disk drive became significantly faster from 1× in the early stage through 16× and 32× to a recent 52×. The rotational speed or rate of a disk reaches around 3,600 RPM (revolutions per minute) in a 16× disk drive, and around 12,000 RPM in a 52× disk drive. However, a disk may be broken in such fast rotational environments if there exists even a tiny crack on the disk, and pieces of such broken disk would fly away in every direction at a very high speed. If any piece of the broken disk came out of the body 110, a user could be critically harmed. The conventional disk drive as shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 has a problem, however, in that it cannot sufficiently shield or block such pieces of the broken disk which have significant kinetic energy, because the door 140 is simply closed by the elastic force of the spring 150.